The Courtauld Institute has been awarded a grant by the Denise Coates Foundation that will enable researchers to pursue innovative projects at the intersection of AI and art history.
The Denise Coates Foundation Awards will enable the Courtauld to award research grants totalling £250,000 over five years to cross-disciplinary teams of advanced researchers at the Courtauld and King’s College London.
The Courtauld’s world-renowned specialists in the history, conservation, curation, and business of art will forge new research paths in collaboration with colleagues across King’s College London. This initiative builds on the 10-year strategic relationship between the Courtauld and King’s College London. It cements a mutual commitment to path-breaking research that addresses urgent intellectual, cultural and societal challenges.
The Denise Coates Foundation Awards will enable cutting-edge research that leverages combined expertise across art and visual culture, humanities and social sciences, engineering, computing and technology. Researchers will explore how art history can harness AI, how artists have worked with disruptive technologies, and how art historical approaches can inform and shape ethical and equitable digital futures.
AI brings potential for analysing art historical information at scale, with exciting possibilities for researchers, collections, and publics. AI reconfigures our understanding of images, image-makers, and image viewing. It demands new modes of visual communication and challenges assumptions about originality, authenticity, and creativity. At the same time, images and artworks have populated AI training datasets that draw on existing visual examples to generate new images, embedding art and art history in the development of machine learning models.
The research enabled by the Denise Coates Foundation Awards will support critical visual and historical understanding of the crucial role of art and artists in the era of artificial intelligence. This important grant will enable novel collaboration, new methods, and different perspectives, bringing together world-leading communities of conservators, historians, data scientists, students, and visitors, with wide-ranging impacts.
Professor Mark Hallett, Märit Rausing Director of the Courtauld, said: “I am thrilled by this new initiative, which has been enabled by the Denise Coates Foundation and which will see us working in collaboration with King’s College London. It will give the brightest minds across our two institutions the opportunity to pursue sector-leading research on how AI intersects with art history and our engagement with the visual arts.”
Lucy Bradnock, Dean for Research at the Courtauld, said: “Artists have been at the forefront of working with new technologies and art historians have led the way in understanding questions of representation, visual communication, and creativity. The critical and ethical understanding that art and art history can bring to AI is crucial, even as new technologies can make possible new methods of analysis and avenues of thinking.”
Denise Coates CBE, Founder and Trustee of the Denise Coates Foundation, said: “We are delighted to support the Courtauld and King’s College London in bringing together their expertise in art, research and technology to explore the growing relationship between artificial intelligence and the visual arts. Artificial intelligence is creating exciting new possibilities for how we understand and engage with art. We hope these awards will give researchers the opportunity to explore those possibilities, ask important questions and develop new ideas that can help shape the future of art and creativity.”
The Courtauld is committed to world-leading research that shapes our collective understanding of the visual arts, past and present. Find out more about research at the Courtauld.